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Effective Methods to Gain New Affiliates

Internet marketing is full of so-called gurus, who peddle their theories; as if, they were concrete, time-tested facts.

We now know what it takes to get new affiliates. This knowledge is scientifically proven fact.

Let’s delve straight into it! Shall we!

BEFORE ALL ELSE

Establish trust!

Off course, the importance of trust is obvious. As George Orwell said, “Restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

Affiliates do not promote your products because they love you. They promote your products because they want to get paid.

Affiliates do not want to have faith that you will pay them. Nobody cares how honest you are in real life. Your affiliates do not know you and they do not need to know you. They must trust that they will get paid.

Here is what, you need to chisel deep into your mind; until, it takes a firm hold in your sub-conscious.

Put your product on a trusted third-party site like clickbank.com, click2sell.eu or paykickstart.com. There are dozens of other affiliate platforms; but these 3 are well-known and trusted by the most seasoned affiliates.

Lesson #2

Groundwork
You must supply prove that your product converts.

If you are going to have any success, you cannot ignore this primordial and overarching rule. Any potential affiliate, contemplating whether to promote your product or not, has to know right off the bat, if your product converts or not.

Whether Napoleon actually said that or not, is irrelevant to the point, which I’ll state in a jiffy. Whether it is better to delegate or do things yourself, is irrelevant to the point, which I forthwith state.
“Promote your product!”

Just so, you do not miss the point, “you have to promote your own product.”

Proof of convertibility cannot be a single sale, which you made months ago. You need to continually score several sales a month. When can you stop promoting your own product? After the sales has gathered momentum, thanks to the efforts of scores of affiliates.

Why must you keep promoting your product; until, the sales made by affiliates have gathered sufficient momentum?

To answer this question, let’s examine clickbank.com. Clickbank.com has a marketplace metric called “gravity”. Gravity provides reliable data about the number of affiliates who have earned commissions by promoting your product over the last 12weeks.

“Gravity” tells affiliates that over the last 3months, people sold your product and got paid.

That means your product is hot cake to present and actual consumers. Potential affiliates need to know at a glance that your product can to be sold to today’s consumers; not consumers of the era, when it was cool, to listen to Madonna sing the virtues of being a “Material Girl” on cassette tapes.

Here is what you need to retain:

SUPPLY PROOF THAT YOUR PRODUCT CONVERTS.

It is imperative that you get a crystal-clear understanding of this fact: any scams will be quickly uncovered.

What happens if you supply fake proof of conversions?

Any affiliates, you attract, will not succeed in selling your products. After a few failed attempts at selling your product, they will simply cut their losses and move on. The affiliates will move on. You won’t. You will move off the internet market-space. It is the fate of all scammers.

Lesson #3

Be Professional!

Believe me, when I tell you that professionalism is not obvious. It is an attribute in chronic short supply. In all three major affiliate marketing platforms: clickbank.com, click2sell.eu and paykickstart.com, there are products in the top 100 without affiliate pages.

It gets worse, there are products with no support page, no contact page, etc. Wait, it gets worse! There are pages on the site of the offer returning “404 error” i.e. dead links.

Listen up!

If you really want seasoned affiliates to promote your product, you’d better have live links for all your pages. And do well to have a functioning affiliate page.

What piece of information needs to leap off your affiliate page?

I’ve told you before. Now, I tell you again. Your affiliate is interested in the commissions, which he’ll get for promoting your product. It is the very reason why he is there.

State the commission or the commission rate.

Is it a one-time purchase? Is it a product on a subscription-basis (monthly, quarterly, annually)? Will the affiliate be paid each time the subscription is renewed? Will the affiliate be paid only for the initial sale?

Full disclosure is not optional. It is mandatory. The compensation plan must be devoid of any ambiguity. You do not want to get on the wrong side of an affiliate with substantial clout because you failed to make the compensation plan clear enough.

It happens all the time. An affiliate may be under the impression that he’ll get paid commissions for the lifetime of a subscription i.e. for as long as the customer he referred remains subscribed. But the product owner (you) only pays one year of commissions.

Be clear! Leave no room for ambiguity!

The first piece of information that needs to be on your affiliate page is the compensation which the affiliates will get for promoting your product.

The second piece of all-too-often-ignored information is what value will be affiliate’s traffic get from your product.

The importance of the value that your product provides to the affiliate’s referrals depends on the source of the affiliate’s traffic.

We shall get to the different types of affiliates and their traffic sources later.

Affiliates who use paid traffic sources care the least about the value which their referrals get from your product. Affiliates who get their traffic from their email lists care more about the value which their referrals get from your product. Affiliates who get organic traffic from their blogs or forums care the most about the value their referrals get from your traffic.

“A good salesman keeps his customers coming back again and again for some more.” Jean Paul Getty.

It is not in the interest of site owners to pitch scams to their visitors. This will turn off their traffic and in the long run produce a lower search engine ranking of their site.

Some forum or blog owners have spent years building authority and trust. We are talking about guys who are on the first or second page of Google SERP. They are not going to promote your product on their forum or blog; if they are not convinced that the product will add value to any customer they refer. If you have a low quality product, you shall never recruit these types of affiliates.

They are also called paid traffic affiliates or pay per click affiliates. These guys get their traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing. They also use social media traffic from facebook.com, pinterest.com and reddit.com.

These guys spend a huge amount of money on “buy keywords”. As a result, they are permanently weary about their ROI. If sales revenues do not exceed the costs of traffic, they will stop promoting your product in less than 2weeks. And they won’t be giving it a second chance.

The good news is that these are the easiest affiliates to recruit.

You only have to launch your product on a major affiliate platform to have them come running. Furthermore, increase the likelihood of recruiting these affiliates by announcing the launch of your product on all major affiliate marketing forums:

Affiliates with Mailing Lists
List owners generate a form of organic traffic because they do not pay for it.

A list owner is a marketer with a list of email addresses. Major list owners have millions of email addresses. The analogy in real life is having the capacity to put millions of advertisement flyers into the physical mailbox of prospects. Imagine the power to reach millions of prospects with a single click.

These guys collect their email addresses through several sources: they put their content behind opt-in screens _ visitors can only access their content, if they enter their email addresses.

Some list owners are also content creators i.e. vendors. Each time a digital product is sold, the customer has no choice but to provide a valid email. The vendor simply adds this email to his list and uses it to resell more products to the customer.

Email traffic is free traffic. The list owner incurs no costs.

With a single email blast, thousands of clicks can be generated on your pitch page URL. The only effort required is to write the email and insert the pitch page URL in it.

List owners are easy to reach but hard to recruit.

Just scroll down the list of vendors on paykickstart.com or clickbank.com and I guarantee you that at least half of them are list owners.

You can contact them easily through these platforms but they are unlikely to reply. You see, just like you are soliciting their involvement in your project, so is everyone else. Out of the dozens of solicitations that a list owner receives in a day, the chances that he’ll reply to yours are phenomenally slim.

However, you will be rewarded manifolds, if you successfully recruit a huge list owner as your affiliate.

Organic Traffic Affiliates

These guys get natural, niche-specific traffic thanks to high rankings on search engines. These guys own sites (forums, blogs, etc.)

The visitors to organic sites are interested in the niche. This is important because the visitors are likely to buy relevant products. In short, natural traffic tends to convert more than traffic from list owners.

Many list owners just randomly bundle everybody together. A vendor might collect email addresses while he was selling solar panel guides a few months ago. Today, he is pushing a hair growth product to the same email addresses. What is the chance, that, the guy, who was only interested in installing solar panels a few months back; is interested in a hair regeneration product today?

Not much!

That’s the problem with email-generated traffic. The product being pitch may not be relevant to the email-recipient at that specific time. The email-recipient might just transfer the sender to his spam folder.

Visitors to organic sites are interested in the niche at the present moment. Pitching to them is more likely to result in a conversion.

How to contact site owners?

Firstly, find their sites by typing your keyword in the search engines. Secondly, click their contact form, usually found in the footer and send them a note.

Do not write a generic note to all site owners. Be as specific as possible. Put in some work and find out the “admin” or “super moderator” of the site. Put his name in your note.

As I’ve mentioned before, when you are recruiting a site owner, do not simply state what compensation the site owner will get as an affiliate. Also state the benefits his visitors will get, if they purchase the product.

Conclusion

There are many other things you can do to get affiliates. The above recommendations are by no means exhaustive.

You can and should submit your offer to all affiliate directories. You can and should get as much social media notoriety as you can.

Finally, the right mind set is paramount.

Recruiting affiliates is an ongoing process. There’s no finite to-do list which you can go through one by one; until, every activity has been checked off. And now, you can slouch cozily on the couch and watch affiliates stream in like bees to a pot of honey.

You are most welcome to try it out; however, that's not where the money is; unless the service being sold has a hook, in which, the continuously offer services or upgrades (in the case of an app)

The real money in affiliate marketing is in REPEAT SALES.
Basically, you want to make a sale to a single customer and have that customer re-order again and again. This is easily achieved by selling some weight loss or fitness supplement.... the idea is that, once the customer has consumed his bottle of pills, he'll have to re-order; in order to continue progress in his weight loss journey.

Thanks! I was turned on to a service based affiliate program by a friend, but I didn't know if it would be worth it. The payout is really high and my friend has made some good money, and it looks like something that can get repeat business, I just wanted to seek advice from someone that knows what they are doing. Not that I don't trust my friend.(in case they are reading this)

Yes affiliates is the way to go. Simple but powerful recipe for success online: 1. Create GOOD product that sells itself. 2. Hire affiliates through Clickbank, JVZoo, Warrior Plus, and other platforms that allow it. Then you DON'T NEED to worry about Traffic building, they will do it for you!!!

From my experience, people who offer too many services do not deliver high quality on any of their offers; as a result, any customers which they initially acquire are not going to stay with the company.

It is just a matter of time before the customers goes out and look for a different company which offers higher quality and that is going to be a company which specializes in one product only.

Whatever, you are selling, you have to sell the very best product or the very best service. That's the key to retaining customers.

Thanks a lot. I read your full article but the last line "The recruitment of affiliates is continuous." made home in my heart.
I've some questions.
You wrote this article for advertisers.
1. As I'm a manager of an affiliate network, I want to learn what steps we can take to attract affiliates? Because we have to attract affiliate as well as advertisers at a same time.
2. Posting our promotional stuff on the forums (you mentioned above) will help or not?

I have seen guys invest so much time in trying to recruit forum owners into their affiliate program. This is a bad idea.

The badness in the idea is not your attempt to recruit a forum owner. It is the amount of time and resources which you spend doing so. Before investing so much time recruiting a forum owner, you really need to ask “how much is this forum owner worth as an affiliate?”

The fact is, you could spend that time posting your affiliate program in affiliate directories. That would be a better use of your time, especially if other promoters are vying for the same forum owner.

Thanks a lot. I read your full article but the last line "The recruitment of affiliates is continuous." made home in my heart.
I've some questions.
You wrote this article for advertisers.
1. As I'm a manager of an affiliate network, I want to learn what steps we can take to attract affiliates? Because we have to attract affiliate as well as advertisers at a same time.
2. Posting our promotional stuff on the forums (you mentioned above) will help or not?

Click to expand...

Those two are very good questions. I am also in a search for great affiliate not only as partners but also as decision makers/industry bloggers who could help promote our service and be counted at credible source.

Those two are very good questions. I am also in a search for great affiliate not only as partners but also as decision makers/industry bloggers who could help promote our service and be counted at credible source.

I represent AdSpyglass, a great tool for Publishers who work with multiple ad networks at the same time and want to see current rates for all networks all in one spot. AdSpyglass is an ad mediation service where ads and rates from top networks are provided all in one page, where single campaign code is given to use on website, as well as payments are combined in one. Plus it eliminated the need to register in multiple networks, and going through all the hustle of approval.